


No Haven Like A Hole

by gogollescent



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-30
Updated: 2014-01-30
Packaged: 2018-01-10 14:18:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,020
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1160676
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gogollescent/pseuds/gogollescent
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ymir and Historia... find an accidental baby. This is probably not a windfall.</p>
            </blockquote>





	No Haven Like A Hole

**Author's Note:**

> Takes place in some nebulous future AU where Ymir has returned intact from her teen-boy-saving mission and is working for the Survey Corps, under Historia's command.

"Ymir," says Historia, when the corpse is a smoking hillock at your feet. "Open up. I want to see if—"

She stops. You, obediently slack-jawed, have to all appearances shocked her; not a common feat, for or in your Titan form. The novelty’s gone out of giant teeth: likewise black eyes, premature balding (is eighty premature? well, pre-ordained), and even a firm yet burial-mound-sized butt. You’ve believed all your life that your body is an animal—both your bodies. It’s still bitter to see Historia believe it too. You can thrill her, as in this case, with submission. But the accidents of flesh: your strength and speed, the grumbling old-womannish noise with which you eat her enemies—upon these, well-documented, sure as mushrooms after rain, your captain has come to presume.

"YMIR."

"What?" you manage, creakily. You’re good at talking without moving your jaws, but the arch of your tongue must spook her: she leaps back from your squelchy gums to crouch on your raised fist. There’s an indistinct white bundle in the circle of her arms.

"Do you even pay attention when I talk to you like this?" Historia demands. "I’ve been trying to get sense out of you for five minutes!"

"…Is that a baby?"

"And that’s the other thing! I thought we agreed you were on humanity’s side now! That means no snacking, even when we patrol the outer districts—"

The rest of the tirade you ignore. With a painful squelch, you rip partway out of your seat in the back of the nape. There’s a dizzying moment where your vision doubles, Historia’s small face intercut with the stand of foxtail pines at your back, and then some nerve-endings snap out of the skin of your cheek, like a pebble pried from a horse’s shoe, and you can choose. You concentrate on your rider, of course, although your access to the Titan’s sight is now imperfect, misty, darkness-smudged in a Mandelbrot set of shot connections. “Historia,” you shout over your own massive shoulder. “I didn’t eat anyone! We can talk about this later! Right now, you need to get that thing to cold water. There’s a creek near here, I can hear it, you’ll have better luck scouting on the ground, but the burns…”

"I didn’t realize it was alive," says Historia, in a different voice.

"We can talk about that later, too! Refuse to marry someone who hasn’t mastered basic infant vital signs!"

"Oh hush," says Historia, and doesn’t ask how you knew. When you saw even less of it than she did beneath the cloth. She rappels down from your frozen, half-cupped hand, held to the Titan’s silent mouth as though to hide a cough; you wait until she’s safely mounted, and has untied the horse from your ankle, to shift your stance. She rides towards the sound of running water, her pale head a distant circle at your feet—like a shaft of sunlight moving, hour by hour, over the shaded forest floor.

You give deliberate chase, not really watching. You are led by what is, for the Titan, an indelible scent: her still-living body, its breath and quick winged heart.

At the creek, you kneel in the rapids upstream of her stopping-place, and watch from the nape as she pours water over the infant’s burns. Privately you are checking between your fangs for any other unwanted detritus, although it occurs to you that were there another—someone—stuck behind your molars, where she couldn’t see, the probing tip of your hot tongue would only do more damage. Unwillingly, your smaller person mirrors the act, licking at your teeth, your dry, dark, scab-faceted lips—

"Ymir," Historia says, for a third time. She’s standing below your human body now. She looks up at you from across the length of your back, onto which light, falling more freely here where the canopy parts over water, collects in plates and scales. Incomplete armor; its gilded weight as strange to you as natural to the current. You can see your vast asscrack if you lean. Historia’s wrapped the flushed-red baby in her cloak, mudstained but still a cleaner alternative than the infectious-saliva-soaked swaddling it came with, and she’s holding it, gingerly, with its face tucked in against her throat. You wonder if she feels your heat in it: the lingering temperature somehow readable. Your kiss, your grin. Ravenous in species.

"I think I must have bit it out of the 14-meter’s stomach," you say. "It was attacking that village before we herded it to the woods, and the baby—"

"Could it really have lasted that long?" says Historia, looking down at her burden. She’s obviously uncomfortable with her grip on it; you remember, not for the first time, how far away from other human beings she was raised. Not for the first time, it comforts you.

"Babies are tough?" you offer doubtfully. "I dunno, Eren made it a few minutes, right?" At her face: "In Trost?"

You remember, also, how differently memory works for people who’ve had a quarter of your lifespan. “Right,” says Historia. “Okay. Let’s get it back to base, hm?” She hesitates, her hand tightening on green cloth. “And next time… maybe just aim for the nape.”

"It was twice my height!"

"You know what I mean," says Historia, looking at the baby again. "Some things were better not brought back." A blade of white-blonde hair, sharpened by sun, threatens her still lighter eye. "It’s going to remember what your tonsils look like for the rest of its _life_.”

"Don’t see you complaining," you say, sticking out your (human) tongue. She smiles, and without replying fires a grapnel into your (Titan) shoulder, a few feet to the left of what would be irrevocable. " _Careful_ —” but she’s already swinging up to stand over you in your neck's raw throne.

"You’re a hero," she says. "You saved it."

The kiss is short and not chaste. Almost enough, in the moment, to make you forget: _some things were better_ —some things were better: the taste of nothing, air, long unwashed hours, when you lick your flat teeth again.


End file.
